Use (Po)E-connected routers and/or additional Raspis to make network fail-safe?

Right now I have one Sonoff P USB stick attached to my Nanopi, using Docker/HA/Z2M/MQTT to connect my devices, some Smart Plugs and Mini Switches acting as routers and extending the network. So far so good, all devices normally act as they should.

As I also have my smoke detectors and water detectors connected through Zigbee, I am a bit afraid that one day somebody just unintentionally unplugs a smart plug or so, which could cause whole branches of the network to go offline. As I have plenty of Ethernet cables available almost everywhere and also some Raspi/OrangePi just collecting dust, I would like to add some real&wired routers at the other end of the network to make it more fail-safe. This could be a “PoE-Powered Zigbee stick” or “Raspi acting as Smart Mirror and also as Zigbee Router”.

What recommendations are there, especially on the configuration part? How do you feed in several router sticks that don’t forward “from Zigbee device to the next Zigbee device” but “from Zigbee device to Ethernet (either directly or through a raspi)”? Would I run Z2M on a Raspi, connect a Sonoff Stick with Router firmware and just feed into the same Mosquitto?

This has been asked many times on various forms.

Zigbee over ethernet doesn’t exist. There is no existing way to bridge the zigbee mesh to ethernet.

The best you can do if you have a remote location is setup something like a separate z2m instance for the remote location, ie: placing a pi running z2m in a detached workshop.

1 Like

Thanks for the clarification, with new keywords I now did research, also on Zigbee2MQTT page. My case is not the remote location / detached workshop style but one house one mesh several access points - so would I flash the router firmware to the stick, load Z2M - and then the data from Zigbee devices that are connected to this router (Raspi, Zigbee Stick, Router Firmware) would be sent directly from Z2M to my existing MQTT broker?

To me it looks like when somebody flashes the router firmware to a USB Stick, this is then just plugged in any USB-powersupply, i.e. no Raspi, no Zigbee2MQTT. So it of course has a better antenna than the typical “mains powered device acting as router” but it is also just forwarding packets from Zigbee to Zigbee.

So when having one network, one coordinator, would a “Raspi with Zigbee2MQTT and Zigbee Stick with Router Firmware” just act the same was any “mains powered device acting as router” or would it transfer data through Zigbee2MQTT directly to the MQTT broker?

Correct.

There is no benefit of poe for a router unless it just happens to be a convenient power source.

Z2M wouldn’t startup in such a config, you would need coordinator fw, and z2m would be a completely separate zigbee net speaking through mqttt to HA.

Alternatively you could use an ethernet connected coordinator to run the second instance of Z2M on your existing docker, but it would still a completely separate Z2M instance, separate zigbee net, managed separately.

This doesn’t sound like the right fit for you.

1 Like

Many thanks, this clarifies a lot. Really, I was reading what I could but never found the info “Z2M wouldn’t even start” which is really very helpful for me. So many thanks for clarifying this.
So maybe I will just go with “every few meters a mains-powered device acting as router” and maybe add some form of monitoring to get an alert if vital devices are offline too long.